In 1975 Kenny Vance (formerly of Jay & The Americans) and the Planotones released a song named “Looking For An Echo” in which they describe the search for the perfect natural echo. WCOS like many other Top 40 stations of the day featured an artificial reverb sound in order to sound more like a concert stage. According to Rick Sklar the legendary programmer for WABC Musicradio in New York, they placed a speaker at one end of a large mostly unused storage room and a microphone at the other end to achieve that sound. At WCOS, we used a three-spring Hammond Organ reverb unit to achieve ours. There was a box on the audio board table that contained two buttons, one of which rang a bell and the other enhanced the amount of reverb coming out of the unit.
DJs new to this reverb system had a tendency to overuse the bell and reverb enhancing button that I’m sure drove Woody Windham, our program director bonkers. When a new DJ was starting, he would always admonish the new guy not to overdo the reverb or the bell. Of course, being in love with the two new gadgets, we would always overdo it the first month or so. Usually, that ended when we listened back to a recording of a show and heard how ridiculous we sounded. Eventually, I settled into using the reverb enhance feature only during the news when announcing the dateline city before each story from the Associated Press teletype.
The bell was a bit different. Another of Woody’s favorite phrases was “TTBB” or “Time, Temp, Boom Boom!” This was to tell us to keep the talk between records short and keep the music playing. I never asked Woody where this concept came from but it appears to have been a common theme running through Top 40 Radio. WABC’s Rick Sklar’s book describes the “TTBB” style that they had at WABC. Because they had a playlist that was much shorter than 40 songs, they recorded all of their music onto cartridge tapes or “carts.” There were two carts for each song, one of which had a chime sound added to the end of each song, the other did not. The board operators were instructed to alternate these carts by playing one with a chime and the next without a chime. The DJ would announce “WABC Chime Time is…” after each song that ended with a chime and “WABC Temperature is…” after each song without a chime. That was a variation of “TTBB!”
That also accomplished the task of making sure the station call letters were heard after EVERY record. This practice is held over even in today’s radio; at the beginning of each announce block on most AC, CHR, and Country stations you can usually hear either the call sign or the station’s tagline at the beginning of each announce break. I’m glad that Woody didn’t require that from us. The only requirement was that we had to say something or play a station jingle between every record; again holding up the standard of high production value and high energy.
At WCOS, the reverb unit was on the floor of the master control room just outside the right legs of the table that held the audio console. Just behind the turntable that was to the left of the air chair, was a stack of cart machines. I’ll explain cart machines in a later chapter. But occasionally I would have to put a cart in the machine in a big hurry by leaning left and backward while extending my let to the right and forwards to maintain balance. During one of these awkward movements, I accidentally kicked the springs in the reverb unit, and the resulting noise was like it was Armageddon. I got phone calls for 30 minutes after the “kick heard ‘round the world” asking what the heck happened. I never made that mistake again.
But I digress from “reverb” and “echo.” My friend, and fellow WCOS DJ Scotty Quick and I would kick around the subject of reverb and echo in studio bull sessions when one or the other of us was on the air and the other sitting in the folding chair in the back of the studio. Wherever either one of us went, we were always listening for that “perfect echo!” Downtown parking lots were rich sources, as were alleyways. Two of our favorites were the parking lot behind the Cornell Arms Apartment Building and an alleyway between Hampton and Taylor Streets on Main Street. This alleyway now sports Columbia artist Blue Sky’s “Neverburst” chain sculpture. But both of these had one big drawback; traffic noise.
One day, Scotty and I were discussing our search at the soda counter in Ken Long’s Cornell Arms Pharmacy over hamburgers. We continued our discussion as we went out the back door into the lobby, noted that there were a lot of people waiting for the elevator, and opted for the stairwell to the second floor where the station was located. All of a sudden, Scotty stopped and said; “Wait! This is it!” We had found our perfect echo right next door to the station.
We ran to the production studio and grabbed the RCA 44-D microphone that was used by Bob Fulton for his morning show and a microphone extension cable. We dragged the cable across the second-floor lobby and I started recording while Scotty started announcing; “NumBER 1, NumBER 2…” After about ten minutes of this nonsense, I heard a gruff voice asking Scotty what the heck he was doing. After Scotty explained to the security guard in the building, the guard told us to knock it off, the residents were complaining.
I guess our “perfect echo” place wasn’t so perfect after all.
I was born in a great Radio Town; Jacksonville Florida. So it was only natural that I joined WUSC (AM at the time) in my first semester 1963. I went on to a career in commercial radio and television in Columbia, WCOS AM & FM, WIS-TV, WIS Radio, SCETV and PBS. I'm retired now, giving back since 2010 to the station that started my career, WUSC-FM. If you did the math you will know that I celebrated the 60th anniversary of my first radio show ever in November 2023.